The True Story of the Harry Potter
by Kaglio
Summary: A retelling of sorts of the Harry Potter 'mythos,' from a rather unconventional point of view . . .
1. In Which Harry Potter is Born

_(Note: Admittedly, I've never been much of a fan of fanfiction, or of Harry Potter at all, for that matter. But it seems to be what the kids are into these days, and artists are nothing if not whores, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. If I get any of the digital formatting for this a bit akilter, then give me a break, please, I'm too old for this.)_

So you asked me to regale you with a story, eh? I can't say I know a whole ton of them, so I guess I'll resort as always to the old one—that's the only reason you asked me for a story in the first place, isn't it? You knew all along that I was one of the witnesses to the execution of Harry Potter, but you kept it a secret all this time. I should mention that I have ways of knowing more than you might think—never doubt me—but never mind for now, you can finally sit at ease as I tell you the story in every invigorating detail, the way only I know it.

And if you don't happen to like it—well, I suppose you won't take it too harshly.

Now Harry Potter was born, as it happens, in a cantina in the town of San Sancho,—you have heard of it, I am sure—much the sort of the one in which we are sitting right now—a little more rustic, perhaps, a little less protected from the heat outdoors. But it was folk just like us, the men and women you see cavorting all around us right now, these were the first people to ever take a glimpse at those cold snake-like eyes of Harry Potter, as chills descended from the heavens above, as even his infantile cries seemed to suck the life right out of the breath of each one of the patrons that day. (I was not myself present that day, as you can well imagine, but I happen to know one or two fortunate souls who were).

It was deep into the autumn night that a disheveled young woman, an outsider whom none of us in town had ever seen before, and whose name we still have never learned, pushed her way through the door and up the door with no small measure of exertion. Her cheeks were flushed and her entire body dusty, and it occurred to some there that she might have just been buried alive (I wouldn't be surprised if she were, for the record). Her body was particularly slim, and her dress particularly loose-fitting, and for this I am told it occurred to no one that she was pregnant, or at any rate, that she was as far along in her pregnancy as she was.

She began to shout to the bartender, in some Indian language which nobody else apparently spoke, and she received only alarmed stares from the confused patrons—until, in clear desperation, she began pulling out wads of bills from her dress pockets and putting them furiously on the counter. Without yet touching the money, the bartender poured her a shot of cheap rum and held it out to her questioningly. Without moving her arms an inch, she put her lips directly up to the rim of the glass, letting the bartender tip it gently in her direction, an odd sort of Communion with whomever it might be that she worshipped.

Her eyes, which had been serenely closed as she drank, opened black and bloodshot the instant the glass was empty. She gestured furiously in the direction of the rum barrel (purportedly scarring one man's cheek with her sharp fingernails) and gave disconcerted gasps of panic. Happy to oblige, the man poured her a second shot, while the pile of money continued to sit forlorn between them. This second glass he offered as he had the first, but her response now was simply to grab it out of his hand with all five fingers, no doubt nearly shattering the glass in her face, and to swallow it fiercely as though she had just discovered that these drinks were as important to her being as was air.

Disconcerted, and in a sense called to action, the bartender began to think ahead. Now he took several shot-glasses at once, trying to pour faster than she could drink, the thought likely being that once she were dead he would have an firm enough claim on her money (and who, after all, could know how much more money she had on her person?).

And so the drinks continued to come, and her fury continued to grow, until there grew around her a sizable circle of spectators, some betting and gossiping, the majority silent, not wishing to disturb or provoke this beast into any fits contrary to her consumptory nature. This binge continued for no short amount of time, and after a while the woman had exhausted the entire barrel. It was with some trepidation that the bartender chose with what drink he would supply her now that her preferred beverage was out; he settled upon one similar in flavor but noticeably sweeter, and it came as a great relief to him and to all those present that she accepted this with no less zeal than she had the former.

Around this point, I am informed, those who were not completely engrossed in this woman's temerity had noticed that dawn was closing in upon them, and by the time this fact was noticed by all, it had become clear that the woman's strength was fading with the rise of the sun. At last, disoriented and no longer able to hold a glass in her hand, she put her head down in her arms on the hard wood counter and the place fell totally silent. This continued for no more than a few seconds.

With just as much fervor, if not as much collectiveness, as she had begun her drinking binge, she spun around in her stool, stood up, towering several inches over most of the men present, and she walked slowly around the circle which had formed about her, her horrible bulldog-face a kiss of death for those at whom she stared. At last she stopped, focusing her gaze upon every bit of a rather unassuming—if anything caught her attention, it was his timidity and shortness in stature—gentleman of the crowd. Fearlessly she nudged a short, small knife out of his belt, he remaining perfectly still and unresisting for the time under her watchful face. Then she retired to her stool.

With her knife held defensively about her, she took one final look around at the room—at its people, at its frivolities, at its scents, which she seemed to detect with her eyes—and at the horizon just outside the door above which the sun was shortly to rise. She took one great unblinking look at all of these things of life, and—uttering one final prayer in her Indian tongue (which the world still has yet to hear again), and plunged the knife into her womb. Her eyes went out instantly and her entire length fell clumsily onto the floor to her side.

Several worried observers ran outside to seek medical help, while others merely stared with pity on the image of the fallen giantess. With the assistance of one man in the crowd, the bartender had her picked up and placed her gently upon the counter. If nothing else, this position would at least make the image in onlookers' minds that much less gruesome.

One by one they filed out, no sign of medical attention anywhere in sight, until at last there remained only the bartender and one other man, he from whom the knife was taken (and yet this man with the knife happened to be the one witness whose word I knew I could trust absolutely—a sign, I think, that I was the one meant to bring this story to conclusion, just as he was the one to begin it).

Once all the patrons had filed out, and our two remaining souls could only sit and look at each other in stymied silence, there entered a doctor. A priest, a Franciscan by all appearances, another stranger in town, whose habit was as light and untarnished as his own complexion was dark and murky, slowly ambled his way to where the woman lay unbreathing and began to check for vital signs. A short while later, he had delivered a baby boy.

Though none came in nor out while he labored, the news of the birth was somehow enough to draw a crowd in its own right—a crowd which was, if anything, bigger than that which had watched her drinking, and a crowd made up of women, children, the frail, the elderly—in short, from those of all walks of life.

The priest was not disturbed by this crowd, though neither did he acknowledge their presence in the room. The baby was a far more pressing concern, and it would be there long after the crowds had stopped coming to admire the miracle of its birth.

In time, he grabbed the baby up in one of his long arms and prepared to wade through the crowd—though not without a few bounties for himself and the child. The stack of money at the woman's feet, he knew without asking, was his with which to raise the child. This money he took in his deep priestly pockets, sparing only a few bills, which he placed back upon the counter.

"For the burial," he muttered to my friend and the bartender. It was the first and the only thing he had said since he had come in.

Less expectedly, he pulled the knife—until this point still lodged firmly in the woman's body—and, caked with blood though it were, he held it at his side.

Now without any free arms—baby held aloft with his right, knife clutched to the side with his left—he traveled slowly and carefully through the crowd, while all who were there clamored for a touch of the baby before it was out the door and gone for seemingly ever. Though few wished to admit it at the time, those who saw the infant up close eventually agreed that the experience had given them all terrible chills, and many, in fact, were relived to see the baby leave town and never to return.

Once outside in the hot desert day—the sun had already gotten far along in its day's journey by the time the priest left the building—he turned sharply to the west, away from (some would say in tandem with) the bright sun and down the long road toward the mountains not far in the distance. Some, I believe, tried to follow the man, to see how far he could make it alone on foot on such a blistering hot day—these fools were all sharply rebuked by nature, for he could be plainly seen continuing at his brisk pace until rendered invisible by the distant mirage.

At this point in our story, I must stop to interject. There is no absolute evidence that the baby who was birthed that day was necessarily our one and only Harry Potter. However, there are a great number of similarities, similarities which I cannot pause to explain here but must reveal one by one as this story continues. In short, we may never know whether or not this baby was in fact Harry Potter, but, for those who have at least some sense of imagination and purposefulness—I hope you won't be quite so cold and unaccepting here—there remains something pivotal missing from the story of his life without the mention of this episode. Hopefully, when all is said and done, you might have an increased appreciation for the various quirks and oddities of my story.

Now Harry Potter—I will have to start calling him just Harry for now on, I can't be so general now that I am dealing with him as a person here and not just an abstraction—Harry was said to have grown up so far removed from civilization and society that he was unaware of the existence of any such concept as 'money' until well into his adulthood—and yet, once he first discovered it, he developed a sense of greed which more than made up for his childhood innocence. Perhaps that is simply the way things are in nature—try to prevent a certain sin in a man, and he will commit it far more terribly than his protectors could ever have feared. The story of Harry, in fact, could be seen as a parable warning us of the dangers of remaining too isolated from society. But enough with this—I cannot go on discussing the meaning of a story which I still have yet to tell.

Now, as I was saying . . .


	2. Harry and the Coyote

When Harry was around fourteen or so, he remembered, every night, as he returned from another long, hard day of work on the fields, his brother Armando would be sitting on their little couch, eating greasy frybread in front of the television, already come back from a hard night of drinking and decadence. If he was lucky that night, the oily skin of his face would bear only his old scars and no fresh dried blood or black eye, and the only stains on his undershirt would be those of beer spilt in the frenzy of the night, midnight snacks which he would, when thirsty or bored, lift up to his mouth, fully exposing his flabby chest, and tongue like a cat. However his temperament was when Harry came home, though, he never so much as raised his voice at him or denied him a seat next to him on that couch on the rare occasion that he did not immediately head for the kitchen and then off to bed.

On some nights, though, despite the deep level of brotherly love which Armando held for him, he could give him troubles unmatched by anything else on this earth. One of these episodes, in particular, which took place when Harry was about thirteen or fourteen, is how I think this account of his life ought to begin.

"Hey, Harry," he said pensively, weighing the heavy costs and benefits of asking him this next life-shattering question, "Have you ever screwed a coyote before?" It was perfectly nonchalant and honest the way he asked it, and if there was any double entendre here it was clear he was sure that Harry already knew it.

"No, can't say I have."

"Then I think it's time you get taught how!" he said, springing off of the sweat-stained couch and already headed toward the garage, unfazed by the cold of the night. "Come on, now's the perfect time of the day to do it!"

"Come on, I haven't even had dinner,"

Unrepentantly, he handed him his half-eaten frybread: "You can eat in the car."

And so, beckoned by an unseen force which was more than fraternal but not quite spiritual, Harry followed him into their beaten-up flatbed, a wreck which Armando deemed too unsightly to be seen riding in direct sunlight. The precise mixture of the starry sky, the cool breeze, the broken radio, the frybread, and, most of all, Armando's voice, which was somehow immune to chattering, gave him a powerful feeling that overrode his fears and had him convinced that coyote screwing, whatever it was or was not, was surely something that must be done (at least as long as it was something done out here in the desert air).

"Me and my friends used to fuck coyotes all the time when we were your age. You're gonna love it."

With Harry imprisoned safely in this frame of mind, they passed by the bar, the post office, and the few other structures they considered a part of their world, and soon they were surging between endless fields of sagebrush and cacti and plants whose names he had never learned, toward the hilly rock forms approaching the horizon, unreal in the ways they deviated from how they recognized them on their familiar skyline. Whatever drinks he had consumed tonight, their effects seemed negligible as he plowed, far beyond the speed limit and the rest of ordinary mankind, toward some secret destination which only he knew.

By the time he pulled off the road and continued at no slower a speed down some likely private dirt road, Harry had lost all conception of time and space. They had reached a massive and flat field, blanketed perfectly by the nicest crop of grass he had ever seen grow in the wild, with the plainspoken reverence of an ancient battleground or cemetery.

He was still a bit unsure as to what this whole business entailed: "So, Armando?"

"Yeah?"

"You said I'm going to 'fuck' a coyote?"

"That's right."

"You mean literally, right?"

"You okay with that?" There was an uncomfortable sincerity to the way he said this, a tone which he had never used before for joking.

Try as he might, Harry had never been able to resist any proposal from his brother, no matter how dangerous, without thinking of himself as a coward, so he decided, as he always had, to hunker down and prove to him once again how much of a man he could be.

"How do you know which ones are the females?"

He grinned in acknowledgment of their shared noble blood. "The musk," he said, and gestured at his nostrils: "It's all in here."

As they stepped out of the car, the doors left ajar for any criminals who could not bother to climb over them, Armando took a single, quiet breath of the local air in his nose, the best kind of stimulant it seems he had yet to find.

A coyote—a shocking realization of what exactly they had just been discussing—howled in the distance, and Armando took this as his call to action, running frantically in the direction of the yell and silently beckoning him to follow him. A flashlight held steadily but at an angle inconvenient for walking, carried his feet along over pebbles and branches as in a demented dream.

Armando stopped suddenly, smelt the air, and, with the help of his fingers, gave a series of loud, carefully intoned whistles which sounded little like those of coyotes but gave Harry shivers regardless.

There suddenly appeared a gray coyote, easily Harry's size but worryingly frail. With a sudden gesture of the hand, invisible to the human eye, he instantly made it sit down as orderly as any dog.

(Note from the author: I have personally heard a great number of stories about children from this region committing bestiality with coyotes and other such animals and there is nothing especially unusual about this particular episode. Naturally, many of the lurid details which I happened to learn while doing the research on this part of his life have had to be omitted for the sake of younger and more squeamish readers.)

"That's a female," said Armando. He waited with trepidation for him to proceed.

"Coyote-fucking's a two-man operation," he continued. "This time, I'll hold her and you fuck her."

"Mm-hmm."

Engaging her in a short, fierce wrestle, he brought her onto her back with himself kneeling at her side, one hand each on her fore and hind legs. She began suddenly to bark and writhe furiously, prompting him to take a few cautious steps backward.

"Now this next bit can be kinda tricky," Armando continued. "See, first thing, you gotta grab her other foreleg, about here—" he held up the foreleg which was already under his control, "—about where your wrist would be. Then, without waiting for a second, cause this is the most dangerous part here, you gotta stick your dick in her right then—and then you'll be pretty safe after that, least till you try to get up. You got it?"

"Uh-huh." Harry was doing breathing exercises.

"Okay then, just go when you're ready—but don't take too long now." Those last six words seemed more sickening to him than anything else he had heard that night.

Fortunately for him, or unfortunately, depending on how one chose to look at it, the coyote took that chance to growl viciously and raise her head at him or at the Harry or at the way Armando was holding him, a growl which sent him stepping backward a good twenty feet and toppling onto his back in a mirror image of her position.

He lay there for about a minute by his reckoning until Armando walked up to me with a face full of pity.

"Where's the coyote?" Harry asked.

"She ran away." He took a glance at Harry's sweaty fear-stained brow and turned away toward the car. "Maybe we can do this some other night," he said from afar.

The feeling of shame was palpable on the drive home and Harry elected to stare due right for the entire trip, after which he lay awake in bed a full twelve hours without a single movement; the walls appeared to be only thin panes of glass through which fear and chill seeped without end. Though their home was little more than a shack, it felt at times awfully big for the two of them.

III. Harry, Who Was Never a Religious Man, Has His First Encounter With the Idea of Sin

By the time Harry awoke, all his memory of the previous night was for the moment stashed well away in his brain. In the living room, the sun was up and shining directly through the little sink window and Armando had already boiled their daily pitcher of peyote-infused tea. For lack of a second bed in the house, Armando slept on the couch, which he never seemed to leave and upon which he was lying now, half awake and half disturbed. While on peyote, Armando would often see himself and his couch travelling through time as inseparable partners, souls destined to be together despite their absolute sack of sentiment for each other, a way to compensate for his violent and unsure love life: as proof of this, Armando might sometimes call the couch _she_ before quickly correcting himself.

"Harry!" he shouted the moment he heard footsteps approach, raising his hands in a gesture of powerlessness.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, I've just been—thinking."

"About what?"

"Well—about if maybe we should be thinking about sending you off somewhere to get a real job."

"But I'm already working the farm!"

"I'm just not sure I can trust you to run the place once I'm gone."

"What're you talking about? I run it almost singlehandedly, and, as far as I knew, you weren't planning on leaving anytime soon."

"You never know when—sorry, this could be hard to say: I'm not so sure you're the right kind of man to run this place—or even work here, really."

"Are you saying I'm not a man?"

"No—of course not. There are all kinds of men in this world—some outdoorsmen like myself, others city folk, vagabonds, intellectuals, priests, soldiers, presidents, all sorts of things, all kinds of men: I'm just not so sure you're the outdoorsman type, Harry. I thought you were before, but after—last night, I guess—I'm not so sure."

"Was it that big a deal, that I never actually did it with that coyote? I mean, I'm sure other people, even some friends of yours, couldn't do it their first time either, right?"

"I don't think you got the point of it all. One of the first things you should've known is that—in this world, at least—you never agree to fuck a coyote unless you really mean it. If you aren't absolutely sure you can carry it out till the end, you'd better not say you would."

"You never told me that."

"I trusted you. I had faith in you, Harry—more faith than I should've had, I now know."

"I'm sorry, I never realized—"

"That's the whole point: you were never supposed to get the whole significance of the thing. That's why I just kind of sprang it upon you all of a sudden."

"I don't understand."

"You were never supposed to understand either. Maybe someday you will."

"Is this my fault?"

"Yes—it's entirely your fault—I'm sorry, but these kinds of things often go like this. They're not very pretty, if you know what I mean."

"Is there anything I can do to make up for this?"

"Not anytime soon. I'm going to have to send you out into the world soon—maybe in a month, maybe two. There you'll become a man, I don't know what kind. There are plenty of possibilities, but we both know that that is not the point here: you want, and you will want, more every day you labor, to return home to me and the farm. Maybe someday—after a lifetime of hard work, and if you turn out the right kind of man—you might get to come back and see me and the farm before I die. But I would not let you get your hopes up."

"I'm sorry."

"You can keep working the fields until harvest is over and I find a job for you. By the way, I think you're a little behind on schedule."

"Thanks, Armando."

Harry drank over a quart of the peyote tea straight from the pitcher in little more than a single gulp: by now, it had little effect on him psychedelically, but, as with most drugs, it could make two individuals who might not ordinarily get along into the best of friends for the time being, and, in this corner of the world, it was imperative for all the few residents of the area to get along with each other by any means possible.

As Harry made his way toward the door, Armando called him once again: "Harry! Are you still listening?"

"Yeah?"

His voice lowered: "One thing you can't do: no matter what, do not confess anything you did last night to a priest."

"Do you think he could have me arrested?"

"No—it's just that there are some sins even God can't forgive."

"I'm sorry," he said as he slammed the door shut.


End file.
